Yeah, that title is a Spinal Tap homage. We are bringing a new siFlash unit to the HPC on Wall Street conference. This uses our new chassis, an updated kernel, and lots of tuning. Still have much more work to do … but its probably good enough to ship now. I ran a few quick speed drills on it. 4.2 GB/s streaming write , and 10.7 GB/s streaming read with 96 simultaneous processes.

Here’s the problem I am trying to solve, call it a many year itch I’ve been wanting to scratch. We build very high performance storage clusters, extreme performance flash and ssd arrays, and a number of other things. At customer sites, while in use, a unit could crash. When it does, we really need a full console log to see the full crash log. Unfortunately, the “write to the screen” method gets very … very old when you are trying to transcribe something … thats happened to scroll off the screen.

There’s a story about Wolfgang Pauli about how another physicist gave him a dubious paper to look over to get his opinion. Pauli, ever the critic, remarked about the paper something akin to this: This is a way of saying that there are failures so deep, so fundamental, that one cannot get past them to deal with the basic issues of the underlying theory. If the fundamentals are off, there is no possible way that the theory could remain intact.

We’ve been getting spammed. So I am now requiring comment submitters to have a previously allowed comment to be able to comment without issue. I hate doing this, but I don’t want this to become yet another waste of bits, lousy with comment spam. If this doesn’t work, I’ll change it to require user login to comment. [update] Since making the change, no spam has made it through, though they have tried.

This is what I get for sparring with 13 year old black belts … sigh … starting to feel old :( Splint, ibuprofen, and no sparring for a while (could do 1 hand and 2 feet, but that requires a far larger ego than I have, not to mention some brass ones … which I can’t say I have relative to my sparring abilities) . Probably can’t handle my bo either.

We have a problem. Some company has spoofed our telephone number for their caller ID, and have been calling up people harassing and threatening them. We get calls from many very pissed off people, and I have to explain the situation to them. Usually its one per week. We took 5-6 calls about this, just today. Ok. Gotta stop this. The folks doing this are dragging our name through the mud every time they do this, as they are misrepresenting themselves as us by using our phone number.

At first I was ready to discount this as “entrapment” or something like gonzo journalism. But … its … not … A plain and simple question, nothing complex. Should we ban corporate profits? What is astounding, or horrifying is the location where it is being asked, and the seemingly normal people happily espousing what is basically a ridiculous concept. Here is my take on this. First off, Peter Schiff is something of a notorious guy.

… and I ran across a situation where we helped out a customer, and we were screwed over after they decided not to pay a part of their bill. They don’t deny they owed it. They just didn’t want to pay it. And the hard part, being that they were out of country, in a different jurisdiction, there is little we could do. This is part of bleeding when you build a business.

Link is here. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had a conversation with a researcher, when we talk about statistics, and they quote me some high correlation coefficient as being evidence of causality. Any physical scientist, chemist, engineer, … knows that you have to treat correlation coefficients very carefully, and you cannot substitute these for a real causal relationship with a backing theory that provides a testable model. That is, the causal relationship is fundamentally an aspect of the theory, with the latter able to guide you on making predictions.

As I noted in an earlier post Joyent had discontinued an aging service, but one which many people had bought into, with the promise of “forever” service. I pointed out that in this sense, forever couldn’t mean, in a literal sense, forever … But I had suggested as well that they would likely try to find a way to make a transition better for people. And they did. This is perfect illustration of how to handle these transitions.